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The industry leader in emerging technology researchMon, 19 Mar 2018 22:01:45 +0000en-UShourly1GIF all the things: Imgur unveils video-to-GIF converterhttp://gigaom.com/2015/01/29/gif-all-the-things-imgur-unveils-video-to-gif-converter/
http://gigaom.com/2015/01/29/gif-all-the-things-imgur-unveils-video-to-gif-converter/#commentsThu, 29 Jan 2015 14:00:49 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=910768Imgur just gave itself an early birthday present: One week before the popular image hosting service celebrates its sixth anniversary, it unveiled a web-based video to GIF conversion tool Thursday. The new tool makes it easy to create GIFs from any video clip hosted at YouTube or more than 500 other video sites. Imgur bills the converter as the next step to help its users tell stories — but it’s also a bit of a Trojan horse to give Imgur a bigger foothold in mobile.

Imgur’s new video to Gif converter.

The new conversion tool is a remarkably simple way to run videos into GIFs: Users just have to paste a video’s URL into a form field, select a segment of up to 15 seconds, add an optional caption and then let the Imgur servers do their work. As always with Imgur, users don’t have to register, and the result can be freely shared across the web and social networks.

That no-frills approach has helped to turn Imgur into one of the most popular image-hosting destinations on the web. Product and growth director Sam Gerstenzang told me that the site now generates more than 5 billion page views from over 150 million unique users a month. Initially, most of that activity came from Reddit, where Imgur quickly became the most popular image-hosting resource after launching six years ago.

Gerstenzang said that over all of those years, Imgur really just built tools that the community has been asking for, the latest being the new video-to-GIF converter. And it’s true: Animated GIFs have been celebrating a huge comeback over the last few years, fueled largely by Tumblr and Reddit. But by giving people a tool to create GIFs more easily, Imgur is also cleverly embracing another online media shift: People are increasingly consuming their news and feeds on mobile devices, on the go — and chances are that they don’t always have their headphones on.

That’s why some publishers and platforms have started to embrace muted videos. Just think of those clips on Facebook that auto-play, muted, or take a look at the content that folks like AJ+ are creating: Short, shareable clips that combine moving images with big, bold text, easily consumable without the need to actually listen. GIFs are really just a natural extension of this phenomenon. At their core, they are videos without sound, easily consumable when waiting in the line at Starbucks or during the morning public transportation commute.

Quizzed about this, Gerstenzang started to smile. “I think it’s huge,” he said about the mobile opportunity for GIFs, adding that Imgur plans to do a lot more in mobile in the future. Imgur currently does have apps for Android and iOS, but they’re really just app versions of its mobile website. Dedicated, more feature-rich apps could be coming soon, but Gerstenzang declined to share any further details.

Imgur has also been preparing for mobile by making GIFs themselves leaner. “The GIF format is sort of old,” said Gerstenzang. The company introduced a new container format called GIFV late last year that essentially replaces the animated image files with looped videos, which are typically just a tenth of the file’s original size.

Gerstenzang told me that Imgur now keeps three copies of each file, be it an animated GIF uploaded by a user or a GIF created by the new converter: A WebM version, which is the company’s preferred video format; an MP4 version for browsers that don’t support WebM; and an optimized GIF for legacy purposes.

Serving up looping videos instead of animated GIFs helps to speed up viewing on mobile devices, prevents browsers from slowing down, and as a nice side effect also saves Imgur a bunch of money. Gerstenzang didn’t want to elaborate on exactly how GIFV has impacted the company’s bandwidth, but said that it has come with huge cost savings for Imgur.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2015/01/29/gif-all-the-things-imgur-unveils-video-to-gif-converter/feed/1Only 0.12 percent of all Wikipedia articles contain videoshttp://gigaom.com/2014/09/23/only-0-12-percent-of-all-wikipedia-articles-contain-videos/
http://gigaom.com/2014/09/23/only-0-12-percent-of-all-wikipedia-articles-contain-videos/#commentsTue, 23 Sep 2014 22:01:17 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=875466How can you make Wikipedia more attractive to the YouTube generation? Wikipedians have struggled with this question for years, but efforts to add more moving images to the popular only encyclopedia have yet to take off: Only 0.12 percent of all Wikipedia articles contain a video, according to Jesse de Vos from the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, which itself is a major contributor of videos to Wikipedia. “With video on Wikimedia we are still just scratching the surface,” de Vos wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision has uploaded a total of 3,800 videos to Wikimedia Commons, the media repository for Wikipedia. This accounts for close to eight percent of all Wikimedia videos, according to de Vos, which makes the institute the largest single contributor of videos to Wikimedia. Video only accounts for 0.22 percent of all files on Wikimedia, and only around 5,800 articles on the English-language Wikipedia site contain videos.

However, adding video to Wikipedia isn’t actually that easy. One major issue is copyright, which prevents many public institutions from adding media to the project. Said de Vos:

Very few archives own all the rights to their audiovisual collections. And because multiple creators are almost intrinsic to the production of audio-visual material, it proves very challenging to find out the legal status of a work, let alone obtain the permission required from all rights holders involved.

For individuals, there could be one additional roadblock: Wikipedia only accepts videos encoded in WebM or Ogg Vorbis, which means that users first have to transcode videos before uploading them to the site. The Wikimedia foundation briefly discussed supporting MP4 earlier this year, but eventually decided against the format.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2014/09/23/only-0-12-percent-of-all-wikipedia-articles-contain-videos/feed/2The story of WebP: How Google wants to speed up the web, one image at a timehttp://gigaom.com/2014/07/19/the-story-of-webp-how-google-wants-to-speed-up-the-web-one-image-at-a-time/
http://gigaom.com/2014/07/19/the-story-of-webp-how-google-wants-to-speed-up-the-web-one-image-at-a-time/#commentsSat, 19 Jul 2014 16:44:12 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=858577Tired of slow web pages? So is Google, (S GOOG) and the company thinks it has the key to speed up the web: smaller image files. Google’s WebP image format aims to replace existing image file formats like JPEG with a smaller file size, resulting in faster load times and significant bandwidth savings for website operators. But will the company be able to convince everyone to switch, or are we about to see even more media format fragmentation?

WebP offers around a third better image compression than JPEG, which can add up to a lot of bandwidth savings and speed improvements, depending on how image-heavy a page is. YouTube was able to cut down page load times by up to 10 percent when it recently started rolling out WebP video thumbnails. Google has also saved several several terabytes of bandwidth every day since switching images in the Chrome Web Store to WebP, and reduced the site’s average page load time by nearly one-third. And when Google switched to WebP within its Google+ mobile apps, it saved 50 Terabytes of data every day.

It all began with video

The development of WebP was a bit of an accident for Google. The web giant was working on a video format called WebM, which is based on its VP8 video codec. Of course, videos are really just a series of pictures, and while working on VP8, Google engineers realized that the format was really good at compressing key frames, which are basically the pictures at the beginning of a new scene or sequence.

Google engineers were working on the WebM video format when they realized that the same technology could also be used to compress single images.

One of the things that makes WebP interesting is that it combines features that were previously unique to competing image file formats. JPEG is good at compressing photos and other detail-rich images. GIFs can be animated, and PNGs can be transparent, and contain millions of colors. WebP can handle all of this, and a combination thereof. “You can have transparency in lossy images,” said Google’s WebP Product Manager Husain Bengali during an interview this week, adding: “You can get all of this in one format.”

Google first announced WebP in 2010, and has since integrated it into both its own Chrome browser as well as Android, and released libraries that allow developers to add the format to their iOS apps. WebP has since also been adopted by Opera, and a there are a number of workarounds to bring it to other browsers. Altogether, up to 46 percent of all browsers in use support WebP, according to browser stats from Caniuse.com.

About those other 54 percent…

Of course, that leaves out 54 percent of all users. Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari don’t natively support WebP, and it’s unlikely that the makers of these browsers are going to change their mind anytime soon. That’s because like so often, everyone has their own vision of how the future is going to look like.

Microsoft (S MSFT) is pushing for its own format, dubbed JPEG XR, to replace traditional JPEGs, and Apple (S AAPL) has long steered clear of Google’s media formats. The most logical ally for Google would be Mozilla, which has traditionally been a proponent of open media formats. However, while the Firefox community has had a spirited debate about WebP, the foundation has remained sceptical of Google’s efforts. Here’s a statement sent to me by a Mozilla spokesperson:

[blockquote person=”Mozilla spokesperson” attribution=”Mozilla spokesperson”]”WebP offers certain compelling features that JPEG does not, most notably an alpha channel, but compression efficiency is most important to us. We’re not yet convinced that WebP’s compression improvements or its feature set are strong enough to warrant the widespread introduction of a new image format on the Web, which will introduce fragmentation and compatibility issues during a lengthy transition period. We will continue to consider WebP and image formats in general, as we believe there is much room for improvement with images on the Web.”[/blockquote]

Mozilla instead opted to stick with JPEG, but make it more efficient. The foundation announced a few days ago that it is developing an optimized image encoder dubbed mozjpeg that is capable of shaving off around five percent of an image’s size on average, according to Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal. These efforts are being supported by Facebook, which is testing mozjpeg, and funding the development of the next generation of the encoder with a $60,000 donation.

It’s true, there are some issues

It’s worth noting that Facebook isn’t firmly coming down on either side of this debate; the company is just interested in improving page load times, and saving a few bucks on bandwidth in the process. To do so, it actually started to use WebP for some of the images on users’ Facebook pages earlier this year.

However, the company quickly discovered that people aren’t just looking at their friends’ photos on Facebook, but instead also download them to share via email and possibly even print. And that’s when things got weird for some Facebook members, who simply didn’t know what to do when their usual apps refused to open files with a .webp extension. Facebook reverted to serving JPEG files again, and Google quickly responded by making Chrome the default viewer for WebP on its users’ computers. But the anecdote shows one reason why a transition to a new format can be tricky.

Encdoding WebP images takes more of a burden on servers than JPEG — but saving bandwidth may be wroth it.

Another issue is increased load on servers. Encoding WebP takes more compute power than encoding a JPEG file of the same quality. Bengali told me that his team has been working on making encoding more efficient with a recent release, but he also admitted that the higher complexity of WebP will always mean that it needs more resources for encoding. But that’s a trade-off worth making in order to speed up page loads and save on bandwidth, he argued. “In the long term, bandwidth savings will be more important,” said Bengali.

How bad is fragmentation, really?

So what will be the next image format to rule the web? Will it be WebP, JPEG XR or even just plain-old JPEG, possibly with slightly improved encoders? “That’s the big question that all of us would like to have an answer to,” Bengali said during our conversation. He admitted that WebP may not win all measurement tests, but insisted that it is a good combination of features and bandwidth savings. And it has the sheer force of Google, and Chrome, behind it.

But without Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari, this momentum only goes that far, and fragmentation seems inevitable. Which begs the question: How bad would it be if there was an image format supported by only half of the world’s browsers? End users wouldn’t necessarily notice, save for faster page load times, as their browser or app would simply display the images as before. Website owners on the other hand would have to figure out how to generate and serve different versions of the same image to different users, which could add some complexity, and mirrors what’s been happening in the video space, where different devices and browsers have long forced companies to encode files in multiple versions.

Chrome and Opera can speed up any unencrypted website by transcoding images to WebP in the cloud.

And in the mobile app world, WebP is increasingly becoming a safe bet because it is supported by Android, and iOS developers can elect to include the necessary libraries to decode WebP pictures in their apps. And even the mobile web is starting to get faster, thanks to WebP. That’s because the mobile version of both Opera and Chrome offer users ways to speed up their web surfing by transcoding sites in the cloud to make them more mobile-friendly. Part of that process is a conversion of images from JPEG to WebP, which combined with other mobile optimizations, helps Chrome to reduce mobile data use by up to 50 percent.

So even if WebP doesn’t completely replace JPEG or any other image format any time soon, it will likely become part of many companies’ efforts to speed up the web. In the best case scenario, site operators will be able to relegate the heavy lifting to middlemen like Akamai, and users won’t notice anything at all, save for faster loading websites and more fluid app experiences. “It kind of is a win for everyone,” said Bengali.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2014/07/19/the-story-of-webp-how-google-wants-to-speed-up-the-web-one-image-at-a-time/feed/10Wikimedia is considering support for H.264 video codec to boost video on Wikipediahttp://gigaom.com/2014/01/16/wikimedia-wikipedia-mp4-h264-support/
Thu, 16 Jan 2014 18:49:06 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=792544The Wikimedia Foundation has tried for years to bring more videos to Wikipedia. But despite those efforts, only 38,000 video files have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, which is essentially Wikipedia’s media library. That’s next to nothing, considering that the English-language version of Wikipedia has more than 4.4 million articles alone.

Now, Wikimedia is considering a drastic step to boost the number of videos on Wikipedia: It may abandon its open source principles and add support for the H.264 video codec, which is the de facto standard for video on the web, but commercially licensed by patent pool outlet MPEG LA.

Until now, Wikimedia has only allowed uploads of videos encoded in Ogg Theora or WebM, both of which are open and royalty-free. However, this could soon change. The Wikimedia foundation officially launched a “request for comment” (RFC) Wednesday, asking its community of contributors for input on the question whether it should allow H.264.

The RFC reads, in part:

“Video is used widely for educational purposes on the Internet. Online videos can be an effective learning tool, particularly for people who cannot read well. However, video is not widely used on Wikimedia projects. To date, only 38,000 video files have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons — about 0.2% of the 19 million other media files in our repository (by contrast, YouTube now hosts over 6.5 million educational videos).”

The document notes that the two formats currently used come with a number of downsides. For one not every browser supports WebM and Ogg Theora. Users of Safari (S AAPL) and Internet Explorer (S MSFT) in particular are left in the cold. What’s worse, a larger number of mobile devices currently offers no support:

“Once created, these files cannot be viewed on over two-thirds of mobile devices using Wikimedia sites — and most videos recorded on mobile devices cannot be directly uploaded to our sites. This is particularly concerning because mobile use of Wikimedia sites is already large (33% of total pageviews last month) and growing rapidly.”

The Wikimedia foundation has traditionally had a very strict stance on open media formats. For example, Wikimedia doesn’t allow the upload of MP3 files because of patent and licensing issues. However, in light of the failure to bring video to Wikipedia, the foundation is apparently ready for a change of tune. A proposal under consideration would lead to every file automatically being transcoded, so that Wikipedia would be able to service up WebM version when supported, and fall back to MP4 for users visiting the site with devices or browsers that don’t support open formats.

However, there is also dissent. Again, from the RFC:

“MP4 opponents consider our free software goals and ideals to be as important as our educational mission, at least as far as video is concerned. They view MP4 support as a fundamental shift in our values — and a major setback for the open and free software movements. They are prepared to stick with the current status quo, even if this means that millions of users are unable to view or contribute MP4 video content on our sites.”

]]>Google starts using HTML5 and WebM for premium contenthttp://gigaom.com/2013/02/27/google-webm-video-rentals/
http://gigaom.com/2013/02/27/google-webm-video-rentals/#commentsWed, 27 Feb 2013 23:32:09 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=615164Google (s GOOG) has quietly started to switch some aspects of its premium content offerings to its open source WebM video format. Google’s WebM product manager John Luther explained during a developer Hangout Wednesday that YouTube and Google Play video rentals are now using WebM as opposed to Flash on Samsung’s Chromebooks. “We will be rolling that out on more Chrome OS devices and other platforms soon,” he added.

Luther went on to explain that Google did a lot of work on the security layer that delivers the videos encrypted to an HTML5 player. “As far as I know, we are the first to ever do that,” he said.

He added that there is a lot of interest from other content services to use this type of technology for their offerings as well because it would allow them to deliver video to a variety of platforms that support HTML5, as opposed to customizing solutions for each and every platform. “A lot of content providers really want to do HTML5,” he said.

WebM was open sourced by Google in 2010, and the company has been working on integrating the format into both real-time video communication as well as video delivery for sites like YouTube. It was meant to become an open, royalty-free alternative to the predominant H.264 video codec, but the overwhelming majority of videos are arguably still delivered in H.264. Luther replied Wednesday by saying that H.264 had the same kind of adoption curve, adding: “I’m very bullish on VP8 for the next … many years.”

Nonetheless, Google is already working on a successor to WebM’s VP8 video codec, which is unsurprisingly called VP9. “VP9 is starting to come together, and we are seeing some pretty amazing results,” reported Luther. “We are seeing huge imporvements over VP8. It’s kind of a gigantic leap forward.”

]]>http://gigaom.com/2013/02/27/google-webm-video-rentals/feed/5YouTube comes to the Wii, thanks to Google’s WebM video codechttp://gigaom.com/2012/11/15/youtube-comes-to-the-wii-thanks-to-googles-webm-video-codec/
http://gigaom.com/2012/11/15/youtube-comes-to-the-wii-thanks-to-googles-webm-video-codec/#commentsThu, 15 Nov 2012 20:17:26 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=585208Updated. YouTube launched its first-ever native Wii app Thursday, making it possible for users of the game console to watch videos without relying on the game console’s Opera browser. The Wii (s NTDOY) app looks somewhat similar to YouTube’s recently-launched PS3 (s SNE) app, with an interesting technical twist: Most videos consumed through it are streamed in Google’s (s GOOG) WebM open video format.

On the Wii, things are looking decidedly different: WebM is the primary video format used in the app, and codecs like H.263 are only used as a fall-back option. This makes the app “the largest deployment of WebM video in the world today,” according to a YouTube spokesperson.

YouTube has been aggressively working on rolling out native and content-centric app experiences on as many platforms as possible, with an app for the video site now being available on over 400 million devices. Part of this has to do with the fact that it’s easier to monetize content in a native app experience. But going native also allows YouTube to add other functionality, like the AirPlay-like(s aapl) experience it rolled out on Google TV earlier this week, which the company intends to bring to other platforms and devices in the coming months.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2012/11/15/youtube-comes-to-the-wii-thanks-to-googles-webm-video-codec/feed/2Ice Cream Sandwich supports WebM streaming, MKVshttp://gigaom.com/2011/10/19/android-mkv-webm-streaming/
http://gigaom.com/2011/10/19/android-mkv-webm-streaming/#commentsWed, 19 Oct 2011 15:03:15 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=423421Here’s a small nugget about Android 4.0(s goog), also known as Ice Cream Sandwich, that hasn’t gotten much play yet: The mobile OS now natively supports the playback of MKV files as well as streaming of Googe’s WebM video format (hat tip to Richard Lawler). The changes were announced through an updated list of supported media formats on the Android developer website.

MKV is an open container format for video files that has become particularly popular with people who download HD movies or TV shows from the Internet. However, don’t expect your Ice Cream Sandwich handset to natively play all your BitTorrent downloads; the MKV support in Android 4.0 is restricted to MKV files that use Google’s VP8 codec, which is also used in WebM.

Adding support for WebM streaming and VP8 MKVs shouldn’t matter as much to end users, but it should lead to an increased adoption of the formats among developers. VP8 has been optimized for real-time video applications, which means video conferencing app developers now have an option to rely on a royalty-free codec on new Android handsets.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2011/10/19/android-mkv-webm-streaming/feed/5Android Soars, But iPhone Users Still Seem To Like Video Betterhttp://gigaom.com/2011/08/17/419-android-soars-but-iphone-users-still-seem-to-like-video-better/
Wed, 17 Aug 2011 20:48:41 +0000http://paidcontent.wp.gostage.it/2011/08/17/419-android-soars-but-iphone-users-still-seem-to-like-video-better/Android may be the biggest mobile operating system, but do iPhone owners enjoy video more often? Statistics collected by video encoding company Vid.ly would seem to indicate they do.

A service for both encoding video into various formats and shortening URLs, Vid.lylaunched in January, and founder Jeff Malkin says company has served up over 5 million videos in that time. Of those videos, 62.5% were watched on iPhones, almost 24% were watched on Android phones, just over 11% were watched on Blackberries, and 2.38% were consumed on iPads.

That seems to indicate that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) devices are being used disproportionately for watching video; recent numbers show that last quarter, around 18 percent of smartphones sold worldwide were running Apple’s iOS, whereas 43 percent used Android. In the U.S., Apple has close to 27 percent of the total smartphone market.

Vid.ly converts publishers’ source video into a variety of different formats and bitrates, allowing the video to be played on all major desktop browsers and mobile devices through a short URL that starts with vid.ly. Today, Malkin is launching a “pro” version of the Vid.ly service that allows for greater customization and access to Vid.ly’s API. Malkin says he has around 100 customers already using the Vid.ly Pro service, and that many of them are mobile app developers who needed a simple video solution to push their ideas forward. “There’s been an explosion of photo apps across iPhone and Android, but not yet an explosion of video apps,” says Malkin. He’s hoping that will change soon, as the first wave of his Vid.ly Pro customers prepare to launch their services to the public.

Overall, several months after Google (NSDQ: GOOG) started a kind of video “format war” by dropping support for the dominant online video format, the world of online video is as fractured as ever. “I think it’s getting increasingly chaotic for content publishers,” says Malkin, who also founded Encoding.com. “There are no signs of convergence whatsoever. Even in Android alone, there’s not one version [of video] that works for all Android phones.”

]]>Skype goes VP8, embraces open video codechttp://gigaom.com/2011/08/03/skype-vp8-video-conferencing/
http://gigaom.com/2011/08/03/skype-vp8-video-conferencing/#commentsWed, 03 Aug 2011 21:00:26 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=388154Skype (s MSFT) has adopted Google’s (s GOOG) open source video codec VP8 as its default solution for video conferencing, according to a blog post from Google Product Manager John Luther. The new Skype for Windows client 5.5 will automatically use VP8 both for one-on-one and group video calls as long as other participants are using the same version.

The codec has also been targeted by patent pool entity MPEG LA, which is threatening to form a patent pool for VP8. Google has maintained that companies adopting WebM or VP8 have nothing to fear, and the fact that a company that’s being acquired by Microsoft is willing to put its eggs in the open codec basket definitely should quell some fears and possibly encourage other video sites as well as video conferencing providers to switch to embrace the format. One should note, however, that Microsoft has so far shied away from adopting WebM for its Internet Explorer browser.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2011/08/03/skype-vp8-video-conferencing/feed/4MPEG LA ready to escalate codec war against Google, WebMhttp://gigaom.com/2011/07/28/mpeg-la-webm-codec-war/
Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:46:14 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=385481MPEG LA could be one step closer to forming a patent pool to use against Google’s WebM open-source video format. The H.264 licensing group revealed in an email interview with Streaming Media that it has identified 12 companies with patents that it claims are essential to the WebM standard, which could be used in a legal battle designed to thwart adoption of the competing video format.

MPEG LA’s plans to establish a patent pool to be used against WebM are nothing new, as the latest statements follow previous threats by the licensing group. (See here and here.) But this is the first time the group has given a hint that it actually has some patent holders on board to back those threats.

First, despite several similar warnings against [Ogg] Theora, MPEG LA has never acted to enforce its patents against that open-source codec. But Theora has been around since 2000, and as such one could argue that as a result, MPEG LA would have a difficult time enforcing the patents that it supposedly infringes on. But VP8 is more or less brand-spanking new, and therefore fair game.

Second, Google has a lot more resources than Xiph.org — the group that controls Theora — does, and won’t be going down without a fight. It spent more than $120 million to purchase On2 and its technology, and wouldn’t have done so if it weren’t committed to making VP8 open source. Not only that, but the search giant said it’s done its due diligence and is confident that VP8 doesn’t infringe on others’ patents.

Google seems to be readying its own defense against MPEG LA’s patent pool, as it has gotten such companies as LG Electronics and Cisco (s CSCO) to provide some backing through the WebM Community Cross-License. At the same time, just the threat of patent litigation against those who choose to adopt the WebM format might be enough to keep some publishers and developers away.

All of that said, all this saber-rattling might not even matter: Despite Google’s best efforts to push adoption for WebM, the format has gotten very little takeup from other publishers or developers. Recent research from MeFeedia found that nearly 70 percent of all videos it indexed were encoded with H.264, compared with just 2 percent of those encoded in WebM.